Computing devices, such as mobile phones, portable and tablet computers, wearable computers, head-worn computers, game consoles, and the like are often deployed with soft keyboards for text input and/or other interaction with the computing device. A soft keyboard is one displayed on a screen or other surface and where user input associated with the displayed keys triggers input of text characters to a computing device. When a user operates the soft keyboard the computing device employs text prediction to predict and offer candidate words or phrases to the user and also to predict and offer candidate emoji to the user. The term “emoji” as used herein refers to ideograms, smileys, pictographs, emoticons and other graphic representations. Emoji are often used in place of words or phrases, or in conjunction with words or phrases but this is not essential.
The Unicode (6.0) standard allocates 722 code points as descriptions of emojis (examples include U+1 F60D: Smiling face with heart shaped eyes and U+1 F692: Fire engine). Specified images are used to render each of these Unicode characters so that they may be sent and received. Although it is popular to input emojis, it remains difficult to do so, because the user has to discover appropriate emojis and, even knowing the appropriate emoji, has to navigate through a great number of possible emojis to find the one they want to input.
The embodiments described below are not limited to implementations which solve any or all of the disadvantages of known processes and/or apparatus for inputting images such as emoji to electronic devices.